A cooperative bank for the world. Here, plainly, is everything it already does.

Money no one can quietly inflate.

EgalChain has two currencies, on purpose. The first, EGL, is the reserve currency: the bedrock, rare. You create it by running a computation on an ordinary computer, not an expensive specialized machine — your laptop is enough. (The people who run that computation and keep the network standing are the miners.) Its quantity declines slowly, under a public rule known in advance. No one can print it in secret to plug a hole.

The second, ES (for Egal-Stable), is the everyday money: the one you pay with, send home to your family, borrow. It aims at stability. The idea is old — it is Bretton Woods: a working currency backed by a reserve. Here, behind every ES created by a loan, the protocol demands more than three times its value in already-accumulated EGL, held in reserve — a deliberate margin, because a bank that lends more than it can cover is exactly how trust collapses. Not a promise of a reserve: a reserve anyone can recount, at any moment.

The digital currencies called "stablecoins" you may have heard of are, for the most widespread ones, accounts kept by a private company that can freeze them on a government's simple request. ES is backed by no company and has no guaranteed parity with any dollar: it is backed by EGL, mined by ordinary people, under a rule no one holds in their hand.

And here is the gesture that matters most, the one already public. On every coin created, the miner who finds it keeps only a third. The rest goes elsewhere: a little over half funds the cooperative credit, the loans banks give no one; a share is split among everyone who keeps the network running; and five percent goes, automatically and forever, to a humanitarian fund.

I carved the share of the weakest into the compiler, not into our good intentions, so that no majority, no governor, no future version of myself could ever vote it somewhere else.

Who keeps the network running, and what the network gives back.

A network like EgalChain stands because people give it the processing power of their computers. That is what mining is: running a computation that secures the chain and validates blocks. The first thing to say, and it counts: it stays within reach of an ordinary computer. The computation is built to run on a consumer processor and to resist the expensive specialized machines. No million-euro farm is needed to have a chance: a laptop, a desktop, a small cooperative is enough. That is a choice, not an accident. If mining demanded unreachable hardware, money creation would concentrate in a few hands — the exact opposite of what is being built.

What the network gives back to those who keep it running comes from several sources, and none of it is money out of nowhere. None of it is a promised yield either: each one depends on the network's real activity, which today runs on the test network, and can be worth zero.

The block's share. Whoever solves a block receives a third of its issuance. The rest you already know: the community, the shared dividend, the humanitarian fund.

The shared dividend. A tenth of each block goes into a common pot, redistributed among those who have mined recently, pro-rata to their work — but no single miner is ever counted for more than a quarter of it, so the largest farm can't take much more than someone mining a few hours a day, and a deliberate equalizing bonus grows the more people take part. When no one has mined, it carries to the next round. Steady participation counts, not just the luck of landing a block.

Credit interest. When borrowers repay the interest on their loans, most of it returns to miners. The more cooperative credit is used, the more those who secure the network find in it: security and usefulness pull the same way.

Savings that work. Whoever locks up ES can receive a share of the network's real activity: a slice of the treasury, the guarantee fund's overflow when it spills over, a share of fees. That income exists only if the network is genuinely used, and is worth zero otherwise. No printing press behind it.

Usage fees. Each ES transfer takes a small commission: one half reinforces the guarantee fund, the other goes to savers. Everyday use funds the soundness of the system.

A credit history that is yours. The deepest thing mining gives back is not paid in coin: a record of your own work, the collateral a bank always demanded and never let you build. Here it belongs to you — mine, and you can borrow against your own effort, with no file to assemble and no one's permission to ask.

Credit you earn, not credit you inherit.

Billions of people have no file, no statements, no banking past — not because they aren't reliable, but because no one ever opened the door.

On the borrower's side

The lending protocols you find elsewhere ask you to already own, as collateral, more than you borrow. That is the exact opposite of what someone with nothing needs. Here, the question isn't "what did you prove yesterday?" but "who vouches for you, now?". A person who doesn't mine — a seamstress, a village cooperative, a migrant — publishes a request: an amount, a project, a repayment schedule they choose themselves. Six people who keep the network running can vouch for them. Their commitment alone opens the loan. No risk committee decides in their place.

A bank asks you to prove you don't need it; here, it's enough that six people say "I'll answer for you."

Their word isn't idle: each block, the protocol takes a share of those six guarantors' earnings to feed the loan, on its own, without any of them having to think about it again. Solidarity becomes mechanical, impossible to dodge. The borrowed money lives in a transparent wallet the six guarantors see in full — what comes in, what goes out, with a justification for each spend. That is what lets six strangers trust a seventh: not a promise, open accounting. And when the borrower repays, her money first erases the real debt, the principal, before paying the rent on the money: she frees herself for good, she doesn't pay eternal interest on a debt that never falls.

On the lender's side

Someone has to answer for the borrower, and that is where a miner can do more than secure the network: they can lend. Vouching means putting your own skin in the game, proposing a rate and committing to hold it. Each proposes their own, freely, but inside a corridor the community fixes, neither usurious nor giveaway; and it's never one lender's rate that applies, it's the middle one across the six, so no isolated lender dictates the price. A miner can back several borrowers at once, within a chosen limit, to spread their commitment rather than stake everything on one person. They can even take the lead: rather than wait for a request, publish a credit offer and stand as its first guarantor. The offer goes looking for whoever needs it.

When the borrower repays, the interest returns to the six guarantors in equal shares. And trust builds both ways: each loan carried to term raises the guarantor's reputation a notch, slowly, and it can't be bought. But the reverse is true too: if the borrower defaults, the guarantor loses part of what they staked. Vouching is a real risk, never a safe investment.

There's a limit to this, and I'd rather name it than hide it: cooperative credit reaches first those within reach of a miner willing to answer for them — a real share of the world, but not yet everyone. The path beyond — where a whole community pools and lends to its own members without depending on a single miner, drawn from a transparent common fund and kept honest by the people who validate where it goes — is designed, but not yet built. It lives on the roadmap, not in the code. I keep it there plainly, so you never mistake what runs today for the whole promise.

A democracy in three storeys.

EgalChain has no board of directors. Decisions are taken at three levels, and every voice is tied to a unique identity so no one can cheat by multiplying themselves.

The voice of humanity

Any verified person can put a question to the world — "should there be a basic income?" — and everyone answers. The vote carries the person's country, never their name: the registry says "seventy-three countries represented" without saying who, at your place, ticked what. The question never closes, the result never erases, and questions can be linked to one another — a counter-question, a rephrasing, a sub-question — because a real debate isn't a string of yes/no but a conversation that branches. For the first time, you could see what the planet actually thinks, country by country, with no media filter and no rigged poll. (These are opinion registries: they don't change the protocol's rules by themselves. That's the storey below.)

Tuning the machine, without the biggest winning

Part of the protocol's settings can be changed by a vote, inside bounds the code refuses to cross. But a vote's weight isn't proportional to power. To weigh twice as much takes four times the force; to weigh three times as much, nine times. Influence rises far more slowly than power — that's what is called quadratic voting. A small miner keeps a real voice against a big farm, and a cooperative isn't drowned out by a giant. For a change to pass, at least 30% of all miners must take part and at least half of them say yes; then two of the three independent keyholders who guard governance must co-sign it — a check no single hand can bypass — and it waits a few days before taking effect, long enough to be seen and contested.

The core, touched only with great difficulty

On a handful of fundamental rules — the money's backing, the split between the miner and the community — the vote changes nature: one miner, one voice, no weighting at all. It takes at least half taking part, an overwhelming three-quarters majority, then all three of those keyholders together — not just two — and a delay of about a month before the change bites, during which an emergency brake can stop everything. You don't change the protocol's soul on a whim, and while the delay runs, the decision stays reversible.

I removed the box from the code that says "this one counts more," not out of virtue, but because an institution with no privileged few has no one to corrupt.

And if you have neither the time nor the wish to follow every technical setting, you can entrust your voice to someone you trust, then take it back whenever you want. That is liquid democracy: taking part without having to follow everything.

Proving you're a unique human, without telling anyone who you are.

For a voice to count once — so one human can't vote a thousand times or grab a thousand shares — you need something simple and very hard: to know there's a real human behind an account, and only one. Most systems handle this by making you prove who you are to them, and keeping the registry. Some will scan your iris in a proprietary orb; classic bank checks store your papers and judge you. EgalChain refuses that third party.

Here, it is the network itself that verifies your passport. It reads the chip, redoes the computation that proves a genuine state signed it, draws an anonymous fingerprint that says nothing about you, then forgets the document. Verify, then forget. What remains is a code proving that "a unique human from such-and-such country exists," without ever revealing which. Your real identity is stored nowhere.

And there are those their own country has struck from the world registry: the refugee, the stateless person, the dissident their state no longer wants. For them, no chip to read. They aren't shut out, even so. There, other already-verified humans attest that they exist and which country they come from, without any document ever being broadcast.

The network looks at your passport just long enough to believe you, then forgets it — and if your country has erased you from the world's registry, three humans who shook your hand are enough to give you back a voice.

That last door rests on the trust of real people: its guarantee is softer than mathematics, and we own that, because security must never be paid for by excluding the very person it's meant to serve. Finally, this identity is truly yours: with a secret phrase you alone keep, you can revoke it yourself if you believe you're compromised, without asking anyone's permission, and recover it later by re-presenting your passport. For a dissident, it's a switch no power holds in their place.

All of this is not ten apps. It's one body.

Everything you've just read — the money, the credit, the vote, the proof you're a real person — is not a row of separate apps. It's one chain, one registry, one shared state. The same verified identity that opens credit for you gives you a voice in a vote and lets you back a humanitarian project. The same ledger holds everything.

It's the opposite of what crypto did. Over there, each piece is its own project: a token for the money, another for lending, another for governance, each with its team, its risk, its fragile bridges. You're asked to juggle ten assets and trust ten teams. Here, you neither choose nor juggle: your identity, your history, your savings live in one coherent system.

Everyone carved financial justice into products sold one by one; I wanted to make it one living body again, and to carve its heart into the compiler so that no one — not even me — could betray it in silence.

And this body belongs to no investor. No fundraising, no token sale, no venture capital to repay. And you'll be able to check: at the opening of the code, you'll find there's no pre-mined share reserved for a fund anywhere, no token sold in advance. EGL is born only of mining. No one is waiting, behind the scenes, to extract value off the backs of those who use it.